For some companies, the primary logic for determining the approval line of an expense is based on the reason for the expense. If this applies to you, read our guide here.
By default, only admins and accountants get oversight of employee expenses and only admins are asked to approve requests for cards and reimbursements. However, admins can customise this approval logic to suit the needs of their organisation.
To do this, an admin should:
Identify which approach suits their organisation best from the list below.
Set up the relevant role and relationships for each user
Set up the relevant approval policies
Moss will then automatically grant relevant permission to users based on their role, send approval requests to the correct people and provide an audit trail for each transaction.
Identify which approach suits your organisation best
Use this guide to identify which of the 4 most common approaches to overseeing and approving employee expenses fits your needs best and to understand if you need to set up managers, teams or departments in Moss: Centralised approval; Comprehensive managerial oversight; 1 layer of authority or 2 layers of authority.
Pick the approach that most closely matches the overarching principle behind your organisation’s expense policy: don't worry about exceptions to that principle at this stage - you can accommodate these separately later.
Centralised approval
All requests and expenses must be overseen and approved by one or two people only, for example, the CEO or CFO.
Add your finance team to Moss and give them the role of Accountant or Admin.
Add your organisation’s executives to Moss and give them the role of Admin, Accountant, or Employee.
Invite everyone else as an employee
Add an approval rule to your policy using the “Any Admin”, “Any Accountant”, or specific users as the approvers.
Important to note:
For a centralised approval policy you do NOT need to set up managers, teams or departments.
Admins and accountants can see all transactions that run through Moss.
Admins can see and edit the budgets of all users.
Admins can create cards for others without approval and have some extra privileges that accountants do not.
To grant a user an Admin role you need to contact our customer support team.
Comprehensive managerial oversight
Every purchase requires approval from at least the spender’s manager regardless of the spender’s seniority.
Assign a Manager to everyone you invite them to Moss
Add an approval rule to your policy using the “Manager” and/or the “Manager’s Manager” role.
When someone submits a request in Moss, we will identify their Manager (or Manager’s Manager) and send them an approval request. This works even if the spender themselves is a Manager.
Important to note:
For a comprehensive managerial oversight policy you only need to set up Managers.
You do NOT need to set up Teams or Departments.
Each user can only have 1 Manager.
A user can be a manager of multiple users
A Manager can see transactions of all users below them in the managerial hierarchy. That’s to say: if Adam is set as the Manager of Bob and Cathy; Bob is set as the Manager of Dave and Cathy is set as the Manager or Eric, then Adam can see transactions of Bob, Cathy, Dave and Eric.
Managers can see any budget that has a holder who they manage.
The smart roles of "manager" in approval policies represents the submitter's manager.
The smart roles of "manager's manager" in approval policies represents the submitter's manager's manager.
Each user can be given a default cost centre. If a cost centre is allocated to a user, any transaction they make will be pre-populated with their cost centre.
1 layer of authority
The organisation is grouped into various domains (teams, sites, projects, etc). For each domain, someone has authority to make and approve expenses under a certain amount.
To delegate the authority for certain people to freely manage spend made by people within their domain:
Create Teams in Moss and allocate a Team Lead to them.
Add an approval rule to your policy using the “Team Lead” role.
When someone submits a request in Moss, we will identify which Team they are a Member of and send an approval request to that Team Lead.
Important to note:
For a 1 layer of authority policy you only need to set up Teams. You do not need to set up or use Managers because you can use Team Leads instead. You should not set up Departments.
Each Team can only have 1 Team Lead.
Team leads can see any budget that has a holder who is in their Team
A user can be a Team Lead of multiple Teams
Users can only be a member of 1 team
A Team Lead can see transactions of all the members of that team.
2 layers of authority
The organisation is grouped into various domains (departments, regions, etc) and those domains are further broken down into sub-domains (teams, sites, projects, etc). Someone has authority to make and approve expenses under a certain amount within each top level domain (e.g. at a department level) and someone else has authority to make and approve expenses under a lesser amount within each sub domain (e.g. at a team level).
To delegate the authority for certain people to freely manage spend made by people within domain, when you have two layers of authority:
Create teams and team leads, to set up your lower level of authority.
Create departments, specify the head of the department and the Teams that are part of it. This is your higher level of authority.
Add an approval rule to your policy for the second layer using the “Department Owner” role as the approver.
When someone submits a request, Moss will identify which Team they are a Member of and which department that team is part of and send an approval request to the appropriate person.
Important to note:
For a 2 layers of authority policy you should first set up Teams and then map each Team to a Department. You cannot assign employees directly to Departments
You do NOT need to set up and use managers because you can use Team Lead and Department lead instead
Each Department can only have 1 Owner
Department heads can see any budget that has a holder who is in a Team (as member or lead) that belongs to their department.
A user can be the owner of multiple Departments
A Department Owner can see transactions of all the members of all teams that belong to that department, including the Team Leads.
4 eyes principle
Preventing admins from creating cards for themselves
By default, Admins can create cards for any employee including themselves. However our support team can configure your Moss account so that when an admin wants a card for themselves it must be approved by someone else before it’s issued. With this setting enabled, when an admin fills in the Create Card form and selects themselves as the Cardholder, the button on the form changes from “Create Card” to “Request Card.” The Card Request then uses the relevant Approval Policy for Card Requests. If the Approval Policy states that the admin the card is for should approve their own requests, then instead Moss sends the requests to that Admin’s Manager. If no manager is assigned to the requesting admin, the request is sent to a different admin.
Preventing people approving their own expenses
It’s possible for the submitter to also be the approver if the approval policy dictates it. However, our support team can configure your account to prevent this. In this case, Moss will send the request to the usual approver’s manager if they have one, if not, it will send it to an admin (but not the admin who submitted the expense).
Delegate approval to a substitute when the usual approver is absent
Sometimes the approver is unavailable but you can't afford to wait for them to return to process the request. For that you can automate the delegation of approval requests to a substitute.